Stakeholder-Centric Design: How retargeting your design process can make you a more influential part of your organisation

Hello! I am Che Harvey! UX Designer. You can find me on Twitter at @chebydesign

I’m a product designer working with small to medium sized startups and innovation labs in Berlin.

I grew up in the United States.

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Stakeholder Centric Design

I’ve found that it is vital to establish yourself as both the champion of good design practice as well as the shepherd of incremental change to introduce a culture of experimentation as smoothly as possible. While experience has given me insight into the workings of design at smaller companies, I do believe that the lessons learned are applicable across roles and industries and could be implemented in larger teams as well because it should be our goal as professionals to build successful businesses while creating positive, inclusive and collaborative environments.

This is a picture of me. I started each of my jobs with bright eyes and big ideas, imagining that I could take the largest problem a company is facing and tackling it from the start.

I thought that I could immediately start providing value and completely transform my work place overnight, inviting my managers to give me more and more projects.

This is an image of F1 champion Lewis Hamilton. In the office I found that going after the biggest problem might not be the best idea.

Design Process. We remember the design process when building digital products, but there are steps that we take for granted understanding how our workspaces operate. UX extends beyond our work place and is useful in everything you do.

This.

You are the product, so properly complete your discovery. Why were you hired? What problems did they think that they could solve by hiring you? What issues was the company experiencing? What were they using before?

How have your stakeholders been successful in the past? Breaking down success and being able to replicate it for decision makers can also be a powerful way to ingratiate yourself in an organisation.

What were the biggest wins over the past couple months and how did they come about? Discovering this history and uncovering similarities between big company wins is one place to look, but I’d also like to focus on wins that were experienced by not one part of a company, but multiple. Pull on those characteristics to become the connection.

Why compromise? 15

This is an image of French Finance Minister Nicholas Fouquet in the 17th Century. He spent a ton money building a massive château at Vaux-le-Vicomte.

This is an image of a massive party in 17th century France. French Finance Minister Nicholas Fouquet then threw a party to show off his connections. He thought it would make him feel loved by his King.

This is an image of King Louis XIV. In 1661, at age 23, Louis XIV goes to Vaux-le-Vicomte

This is another image of Louis XIV. Louis left feeling insecure, and was outraged by the fact that people were more impressed with Fouquet than they were with him. In short, the King found a convenient excuse to get rid of Fouquet and threw him in prison for the next 20 years.

This is an image of Versailles. King Louis XIV went ahead to build Palace of Versailles

This is an image of Galileo. Galileo did the opposite of the French minister and dedicated his findings to the Medici family. This brought him much success.

This is an image of the book, 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Both these stories come from a book I read a few years ago called the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It discusses how to amass influence and to work with others to accomplish your goals. In reality, the other 47 rules are ruthless and often ethically inept ways to absolute victory in all aspects of business, (Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit, and Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim, Keep others in suspended terror, cultivate an air of unpredictability) but the underlying rule from these two stories have been invaluable during my time adapting to a new company and culture.

How to compromise? 23

Be patient! It changes someone who may be against you into a support system. Take the time to first understand yourself and your stakeholder’s emotional and psychological state. Understand their basic fears: hate, jealousy and also primary emotions their loves—freedom, family.

This is an image of photographer Joshua Kissi. Find out what your stakeholders are trying to accomplish. If its engineering, product, or the business needs, it’s your job to uncover what metric each of these groups is trying to push and what makes them look good. There’s a technique I’ve learned from photographers. In the first contact with them, find something that you like about them, or something that they like about themselves. For example, it’s said that a person will cover the half of their face that they are least excited about. Highlight the other. How this translates to the workplace is by figuring out what they promote either internally at work or publically through a blog, their professional profiles like Xing or LinkedIn or simply through asking what their biggest success at work has been and why they think they accomplished it. Find a way to make them win in the way they like to.

This is a image taken from the movie, “Sorry to Bother You.” Everyone is still at a job and everyone has bosses. In corporate sales when selling a product or a service to someone, it’s better to think that you’re removing reasons why someone can say no, because ultimately the person you’re on the phone with will need to defend the purchase to their hireup. Take away reasons that someone can say NO. In many cases cost is usually a factor. If ethnographic research costs too much, try bringing users into the office, or conduct remote testing, or guerilla testing in the street, and if your company won’t go for that, think about testing ideas within your organization, but with departments and groups that are far enough away from knowing the subject too deeply. The point being, you can treat your design approach like an MVP. You don’t need to have a lab to show your value, so try stepping down the list with more reasonable alternatives that eliminate stakeholder concerns and when the results come back and show value to the design process then it could be possible to move back towards the ideal situation.

Bring all of your learnings together in your own repository at first. Collect each of the departments in whatever tool you use to organise your thoughts and note which departments are key in getting thoughts through. Collect and document everything from internal team learnings to what you learn from articles, podcasts, and conferences. Write out what you’ve learned in your own articles and know which metrics are important to the business so you can fall back on them when the time comes.

There are a million ways to do things so remember there is a difference between consensus and alignment. Alignment is not consensus. Consensus is when you take the overlapping parts of individual opinions and highlight what is common. This is usually the lowest hanging fruit and everyone is left with something missing.

Alignment is the goal. This way, you will be able to objectively say “Hey, we wanted to accomplish this and we did or didn’t.” If not, no problem, it opens a conversation up to what went wrong and how to address it moving forward.

This is a quote from Abigail Hart Gray that says Pick something which has no value to the company currently, little or no value, and choose that to do a rapid kind of workshops, sprint process to rebuild it.

Passive education is about making information accessible to your stakeholders and the company as a whole. I’ve found that sharing what you’ve uncovered about users in a public forum where the information can be reviewed leisurely works best.

Find a memorable environment and hold conversations outside of the normal environment to break up the monotony of the daily routine.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Legacy Respect the old ways.

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to pushback.

The individual who initiates strong changes often becomes the scapegoat for any kind of dissatisfaction.

Remember to include staeholders, understand that there will be resistance and educate and continuously learn.

Thank you! Reach out to me at @chebydesign on Twitter or send me an email at hello@cheharvey.com

Credits ▪ Presentation template by SlidesCarnival ▪ Photography by Joshua Kissi & Dale de Vera 44